To the Hilt (3 page)

Apart from a bed, a small table, a chest of drawers and one comfortable chair, the whole room was taken up by three easels, stacked canvases, a work stool, a wall of shelves and the equivalent of a kitchen table covered with pots and tubes of paints, and other essentials of my work like jugs of brushes and painting knives and jam jars full of clear or dirty water.

Lack of space and my own instincts dictated order and overall tidiness, but chiefly the disciplined organization was the result of the very nature of the acrylics themselves : they dried so fast when exposed to air that lids had to be replaced, tubes had to be capped, only small quantities could be squeezed onto a palette at a time, brushes had to be constantly rinsed clean, knives wiped, hands washed. I kept large amounts of clean and dirty water in separate buckets under the table and used tissues by the jeepload for keeping mess at bay.

Despite all care I had few clothes free of paint stains and had to sand down the wood-block floor now and then to get rid of multicolored sludge.

The mess the four demons had made of all this was spectacularly awful.

I had left work in progress on all three easels, as I often painted three pictures simultaneously. All three were now facedown on the floor, thoroughly saturated by the kicked-over buckets. My worktable lay on its side, pots, brushes and paints spilling wide. Burst paint tubes had been squashed underfoot. My bed had been tipped over, chest of drawers ransacked, box files pulled down from the shelves, ditto books, every container emptied, sugar and coffee granules scattered in a filthy jumbled chaos.

I stood without energy in the doorway looking at the depressing damage and working out what to do. The clothes I was wearing were torn and dirty and I’d been bleeding from many small scrapes and scratches. The bothy had been robbed, as far as I could see, of everything I could have raised money on. Also my wallet had gone and my watch had gone. My checkbook had been in the jeep.

I had said I would go to London.

Well... so I bloody well
would.

Mad Alexander. Might as well live up to the name.

Apart from moving back into the room the chair and other things that were half out of the doorway, I left the scene mostly as it was. I sorted out only the cleanest jeans, jersey and shirt from the things emptied out of the chest of drawers, and I changed into them out by the burn, rinsing off the dried trickles of blood in the cold clean water.

I ached deeply all over.

Bloody bastards.

I walked along to the privy, but there had been nothing to steal there, and they had left it alone. Of the two original but ruined flanks to my habitable room, one was now a carport with a gray camouflage-painted roof of corrugated iron; the other, still open to the skies, was where I kept the gas cylinders (in a sort of bunker) and also trash cans, now empty, as I had taken the filled black trash bags down to the post office for disposal that morning. Let into one tumbledown wall there were the remains of what might have been a fireplace with a small oven above. Perhaps the place had once been a kitchen or bakehouse; but I’d been happier with gas.

Nothing in these two side sections had been vandalized. Lucky, I supposed.

From the jumble on the main bothy floor I harvested a broken stick of charcoal and slid pieces of it into my shirt pocket, and I found a sketch-pad with some clean pages; and armed with such few essentials, I left home and set off down the wandering path to the road.

The Monadhliath Mountains, rising sharply to between two and a half and three thousand feet, were rounded rather than acutely jagged, but were bare of trees and starkly, unforgivingly gray. The steep path led down to heather-clad valley slopes and finally to a few pine trees and patches of grass. The transition from my home to the road was always more than a matter of height above sea level: up in the wild taxing granite wilderness, life—to me at any rate—felt simple, complete and austere. I could work there with concentration. The clutching “normal” life of the valley diminished my awareness of something elemental that I took from the Paleolithic silence and converted into paint: yet the canvases I sold for my bread and butter were usually full of color and lightheartedness and were, in fact, mostly pictures of golf.

By the time I reached the road there was a hint in the quality of light of dusk hovering in the wings getting ready to draw together the skirts of evening. It was the time of day when I stopped painting. As it was then September, watch or no watch, I could pretty accurately guess at six-thirty.

Even though it had been bypassed by the busy A9 artery from Inverness to Perth, there was enough traffic on the road for me to hitch a ride without much difficulty, but it was a shade disconcerting to find that the driver who stopped to pick up a long-haired jeans-clad young male stranger was an expectant-eyed fortyish woman who put her hand caressingly on my knee half a mile into the ride.

Lamely I said, “I only want to go to Dalwhinnie railway station.”

“Boring, aren’t you, dear?”

“Ungrateful,” I agreed. And bruised, tired and laughing inside.

She took the hand away with a shrug. “Where do you want to go?” she asked. “I could take you to Perth.”

“Just Dalwhinnie.”

“Are you gay, dear?”

“Er,” I said. “No.”

She gave me a sideways glance. “Have you banged your face?”

“Mm,” I said.

She gave me up as a prospect and dropped me half a mile from the trains. I walked, ruefully thinking of the offer I’d declined. I’d been celibate too long. It had become a habit. Bloody feeble, all the same, to pass up a free lunch. My ribs hurt.

Lights were going on everywhere when I reached the station and I was glad of the minimum shelter of its bare ticket office, as the air temperature was dropping alarmingly towards night. Shivering and blowing on my fingers, I made a telephone call, endlessly grateful that this instrument at least was in fine working order and not suffering from a clone of Donald Cameron.

A collect call via the operator.

A familiar Scots voice spluttered at the far end, talking first to the operator, then to me. “Yes, of course I’ll pay for the call.... Is that really you, Al? What the heck are you doing at Dalwhinnie?”

“Catching the night train to London. The Royal Highlander.”

“It doesn’t go for hours.”

“No ... What are you doing at this moment?”

“Getting ready to leave the office and drive home to Flora and a good dinner.”

“Jed...”

He heard more in my voice than just his name. He said sharply, “Al? What’s the matter?”

“I ... um ... I’ve been burgled,” I said. “I’d ... um ... I’d be very glad of your help.”

After a short silence he said briefly, “I’m on my way,” and the line went quiet.

Jed Parlane was my uncle’s factor, the man who managed the Kinloch Scottish estates. Though he’d been in the job less than four years we had become the sort of friends that took goodwill from each other for granted. He would come. He was the only one I would have asked.

He was forty-six, a short stocky Lowland Scot from Jedburgh (hence his name), whose plain common sense had appealed to my uncle after the turmoil stirred up by an arrogant predecessor. Jed had calmed the resentful tenants and spent maintenance money oiling many metaphorical gates, so that the huge enterprise now ran at a peaceful profit. Jed, the wily Lowlander, understood and used the Highlanders’ stubborn pride; and I’d learned more from him about getting my own way than perhaps he realized.

He came striding into Dalwhinnie station after his twelve-or-more-mile drive to reach me, and stood four-square in front of where I sat on a brown-painted bench against a margarine wall.

“You’ve hurt your face,” he announced. “And you’re cold.”

I stood up stiffly, the overall pain no doubt showing. I said, “Does the heater work in your car?”

He nodded without speaking and I followed him outside to where he’d parked. I sat in his front passenger seat while he restarted the engine and twiddled knobs to bring out hot air, and I found myself unexpectedly shuddering from the physical relief.

“OK,” he said, switching on the car’s internal light, “so what’s happened to your face? You’re going to have a hell of a black eye. That left-hand side of your forehead and temple is all swollen ...” He stopped, sounding uncertain. I was not, I guessed, my usual picture of glowing good health.

“I got head-butted,” I said. “I got jumped on and bashed about and robbed, and don’t laugh.”

“I’m not laughing.”

I told him about the four pseudo-hill-walkers and the devastation in the bothy.

“The door isn’t locked,” I said. “They took my keys. So tomorrow maybe you’ll take your own key along there... though there’s nothing left worth stealing ...”

“I’ll take the police,” he said firmly, aghast.

I nodded vaguely.

Jed pulled a notebook and pen from inside his jacket and asked for a list of things missing.

“My jeep,” I said gloomily, and told him its number. “Everything in it... food and stores, and so on. From the bothy they took my binoculars and camera and all my winter padded clothes and four finished paintings and climbing gear and some Glenlivet... and my golf clubs.”

“Well ... look on the bright side. My bagpipes are in Inverness having new bits fitted, and I’ve sent my passport away for renewal.” I paused. “They took all my cash and my credit card... I don’t know its number, though it’s somewhere on file in your office... will you alert them? ... and they took my father’s old gold watch. Anyway,” I finished, “if you have a credit card with you, will you lend me a ticket to London?”

“I’ll take you to a hospital.”

“No.”

“Then come home to Flora and me. We’ll give you a bed.”

“No ... but thanks.”

“Why
London?”

“Ivan Westering had a heart attack.” I paused briefly, watching him assimilate the consequences. “You know my mother... though I suppose you don’t actually know her all that well... she would never ask me to help her but she didn’t say
not
come, which was as good as an SOS ... so I’m going.”

“The police will want you to give a statement.”

“The bothy is a statement.”

“Al, don’t go.”

“Will you lend me the fare?”

He said, “Yes, but ...”

“Thanks, Jed.” I fished a piece of charcoal stick out of my shirt pocket and opened the sketchbook I still carried. “I’ll draw them. It’ll be better than just describing them.”

He watched me start and with a touch of awkwardness said, “Were they looking for anything special?”

I glanced across at him with half a smile. “One of them kept saying, ‘Where is it?’ ”

Anxiously he said, “Did you tell them?”

“Of course not.”

“If you’d told them, they might have stopped hitting you.”

“And they might have made sure I was dead, before they left.”

I drew the four men in a row, face-on: knees, boots, glasses, air of threat.

“Anyway,” I said, “they didn’t say what were looking for. They just said, ‘Where is
it?’
so it might have been
anything.
They might have been fishing for anything I valued. For what I valued most, if you see what I mean?”

He nodded.

I went on, “They didn’t call me by name. They’ll know it now, because it was all over things in the jeep.” I finished the composite sketch and turned to a clean page. “Do you remember those hikers who preyed on holidaymakers last year in the Lake District? They robbed trailers, mobile homes.”

“The police caught them,” Jed agreed, nodding. “But those hikers didn’t
beat
people and throw them down mountains.”

“Might be the same sort of thing, though. I mean, just opportunist theft.”

I drew the head of the “Where is it?” man, as I remembered him the most clearly. I drew him without glasses.

“This is their leader,” I explained, shading planes into the bony face. “I’m not good at voices and accents, but I’d say his was sloppy southeast England. Same with them all.”

“Hard men?”

“They’d all done time in a boxing gym, I’d say. Short arm jabs, like at a punch bag.” I swallowed. “Out of my league.”

“Al...”

“I felt an utter fool.”

“That’s illogical. No one could fight four at once.”

“Fight? I couldn’t even
connect.”
I broke off, remembering. “I scratched one of their faces... He was the one who crashed his head against mine.” I turned to a fresh page in the sketchpad and drew again, and his face came out with a clawed cheek, eyes glaring through round glasses and a viciousness that leaped off the paper.

“You’d know him again,” Jed said with awe.

“I’d know them all.”

I gave him the sketchpad. He looked from drawing to drawing, troubled and kind.

“Come home with Flora and me,” he repeated. “You look bad.”

I shook my head. “I’ll be all right by tomorrow.”

“The next day is always the worst.”

“You’re a laugh a minute.”

After a while he sighed heavily, went into the station and returned with tickets.

“I got you a sleeper for tonight, and an open return for whenever you come back. Ten-oh-one from here, arrives at Euston at seven forty-three in the morning.”

“Thanks, Jed.”

He gave me cash from his pockets. “Phone me tomorrow evening.”

I nodded.

He said, “They’ve put the heater on in the waiting room here.”

I shook his hand gratefully and waved him away home to his comfortable Flora.

Best to forget that night. The face that looked back from an oblong of mirror as the train clattered over the points on the approach to Euston was, I realized, going to appeal to my mother’s fastidious standards even less than usual. The black eye was developing inexorably, my chin bristled, and even I could see that a comb would be a good idea.